Going to Chris's House [UPDATED WITH WONDERFUL LINKS]

[If you loved the backgrounds in "Bambi," see especially the links about Tyrus Wong.]

Two nights in a row now we've gone to visit Chris, Jacques' Feldenkrais teacher/physical therapist.  Her husband and daughter visiting from college went up to Long Island to deal with her husband's father's illness, so she was alone with three rocking chairs and a glider on her porch.  She invited us over.  Last night was just a social visit, tonight was J's "lesson."

It's good for us to get out of the house, so we go even though it takes a daunting effort.  J, who weighs around 290 pounds, must be washed, dressed, gotten out of bed with a simpler (sliding board) or more complicated (patient lift) device depending on his energy, hauled into an upright position, his socks and shoes put on, hair combed, then he must be wheeled outside and onto the van's lift platform, lifted, and then, since the doorframe of the lift is too low for him, tipped backwards and leaned against me and maneuvered through the doorway balanced on the wheelchair's big back wheels (if I'm in a good mood, to a chorus of "Low bridge, everybody down").   Then he has to be strapped down with tension at four points.  He'd been sliding onto his tailbone in the wheelchair during car rides, which was painful, and I'd keep having to pull over and haul him upright again.  Chris figured out that we could prevent that by blocking his knees from moving forward with a foam wedge and roller stuffed between his knees and the back of the driver's seat.  Now getting ready takes even longer, but car rides need no longer be contemplated with exasperation and dread.

Chris lives less than half an hour outside of town, yet deep in rolling dairy farm country, on a wooded gravel road lined with little horse pastures and chicken houses and old barns.  As we drive in it amuses and embarrasses me to realize that my pleasure in woods and forests is permanently conditioned by the very beautifully drawn one [scroll to bottom] I saw in "Bambi" as a child (Chinese-inspired, by Tyrus Wong*, overseen by our friend Dick Kelsey), accompanied by a chorus singing "Love Is a Song that Never Ends."  It's quiet at Chris's, the lush hush of leaf-damp and birdsong, and today I fall deeply asleep on the glider while she works on Jacques.  I used to be a nature freak, and J never was (his experience of sleeping outdoors was way too radical and non-discretionary).  Being with him, especially now, has meant resolutely closing my senses to what I would once have sentimentally wallowed in (and come back studded with Lyme-bearing ticks, no doubt).  But it creeps in around the edges and slakes some root thirst.

Not far from Chris's is the ice cream store attached to a celebrated local dairy farm, Maple View, that makes its own ice cream:

 

Yesterday we met there before going to her house.  Today when J and I left her house, we went back.  As we drive out the gravel road, muscular red deer stand so still we think they're painted statues, then scamper off into the woods.  As I do whenever I fasten my seatbelt -- and he is why I fasten it -- every time I see a deer by the road I think of my veterinarian friend Laurence Reeve, and how it was the last thing he saw in this world the night before New Year's Eve on a dark Pennsylvania road in the early Nineties.  He instinctively swerved away from harming the deer and killed himself, because in that casually macho way of a guy out of sight of his safety-nagging girlfriend, he wasn't wearing his seatbelt.  There may have been ice.  The cops said he could've either walked or driven away from the light pole he'd wrapped his Jeep around instead of being in a coma for ten days and then under a stone in a Riverhead, L.I. cemetery.  He was exactly my age, mid-forties when he died.  One of those few people and cats I've settled into missing permanently.  Love is a song that never ends.

Anyway . . . last night it was around 8:30 P.M. and the pre-summer dusk was deepening.  The ice cream store has a long country-store sittin' porch that faces open, rolling farms and the sunset.  The sun was long gone when we got there, replaced by heat lightning over the western horizon, like the fidgety glow of an unseen TV; people were sitting on the porch, kids played in a neighboring field, fireflies erupted from the grass like Roman candles.  It could have been a Norman Rockwell scene, but with one improvement:  the people on the porch were white, black, and Mexican, laughing and eating ice cream side by side while their toddlers made eyes at each other.

"Our Town."  I felt like one of the witnessing ghosts.

________________________

* "I was working at Disney doing in-betweening for $2.50 a day.  At the end of the day, my eyes felt like tennis balls popping out of my head.  Then I heard they were going to do Bambi.  On my own, I drew sketches.  They said to me, 'We think you're in the wrong department.  How would you like to do pre-production for the whole picture?'  I worked on Bambi for four-and-a-half years."

     ~ Tyrus Wong interview, 1991 (He was still alive in 2004, age 93, making and flying kites!)

"His Chinese-inspired sketches and background paintings set the tone for Bambi, which features some of the most striking and beautiful art ever created by the Disney Studio.  As one scholar has noted, 

'He shows you less of what you would see and more of what you should feel looking at a forest.'"

           ~  From the exhibition catalog, 2004
         Chinese American Museum, Los Angeles

Comments

[david]

With a touch of "The Man Who Came to Dinner".

[Winston]

That porch scene at the ice cream store -- special. We don't see that often, but enough to let us know it is possible. Why can't we all just get along?

[Bitterroot]

What an evocative story...and so glad you and J could have this little jaunt together. I agree about the deep peace of the woods - being there provides spiritual strength to keep going. Hope you can go back again!

[Ruth Anne]

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. And I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep.

[Michael Reynolds]

Just goes to show you what different writers we are. I went out to that same ice cream store couple years ago, came back and wrote an "Incoherent Rage" post suggesting people should terrorize bicyclists by throwing their car in neutral and gunning the engine.

[meade]

Good [ice creams] make good neighbors.

[Melinda]

I was watching a travel feature on North Carolina recently and apparently there is a large Mexican community. Who knew?

my pleasure in woods and forests is permanently conditioned by the very beautifully drawn one I saw in "Bambi" as a child (the work of our friend Dick Kelsey), accompanied by a chorus singing "Love Is a Song that Never Ends."

"Love is a song that never ends,
Life may be brief and fleeting."

I had the "Bambi" record when I was a kid, in the days long before video. I think I inherited it from a cousin. It had all the songs on it, plus narration by Jimmy Dodd from the Mickey Mouse Club.

[amba]

Winston: I suspect ice cream is the great reconciler. Sort of like Christmas between the trench lines in WWI.

[amba]

Bitterroot -- so true; I slept deeply last night after writing that, and actually remembered a dream this morning (a great rarity now, without which, however, I feel disoriented and only half there), and am unaccountably serene this morning.

[amba]

Yeah, Michael, now that you mentioned it, the bicyclists are real pests along that road. It's two-lane with a double yellow line and lots of curves where you can't see what's coming, so you basically have a choice between knocking the bicyclist into the woods or colliding with a truck head-on. No contest.

[karen]

I wonder what breed of cows they have? The richest milk comes from Gurnseys or Jerseys(the little brown cows), but i still prefer Holsteins.

I love the country.

[amba]

Well, Chris's closest friend's family had Ayrshires. But they had to sell their herd, because this generation doesn't have enough dedicated men to keep it going.

[Ruth Anne]

Was their herd shot 'round the world?

[ThinkItThroughNow...]

But they had to sell their herd, because this generation doesn't have enough dedicated men to keep it going.

psst amba, I know you're into that genetic determination thing but get this ... chicks can farm these days too!

[karen]

Heh- i always got a kick out of being a female farmer-- i never mind being refered to in the masculine-- because i'm obviously... not.

Chicks can farm, true- but, there is a lot of major grunt work to dairying and it's nice to have two- farmer and his wife(or- whatever). I know a female farmer that puts many a man to shame. She works hard and does all the tractor work, etc. Unfortunately, she looks the part. Spud'll vouch.

[amba]

Ruth Anne -- no, only as far as Florida!

Think it Through -- think it through! It wasn't me who said they couldn't farm with three daughters and two sons, one of them too lazy. It was them. Maybe the husbands of the girls didn't want to farm. I don't know the people myself, I only know the bare outlines of the story. Farm families may tend to be more traditional than us city folk. And physical strength IS a help. But, as I said, it was the other son's decision that he had to sell the farm because he didn't have a full partner in his brother.

[amba]

And where do you get that I'm into genetic "determination" (it's called "determinism"?). You're on the wrong blog.

[karen]

I just qanted to add that Aryshires are beautiful- anice, deep red colour. Good cows.

Plus, in terms of my wanting our family farm-- if i'd have been born w/a penis- i would have been given the chance. I don't know if that's sexist, traditional- wrong or right. *shrug* It's the way things seem to be done, so- go figure. I don't resent that- i just feel sad because i think it's a helluva farm.

[ThinkItThroughNow...]

Farm families may tend to be more traditional than us city folk. And physical strength IS a help.

Duh! Didja pick that nugget up at the corner ice cream meetin' place? Just a little note that in some parts, those kind of genetic determinations are being overcome. Women marry and bear sons and work within the extended family. You should get out more because there's peoples who respect tradition and don't find it so limitin' as you may think. No need to get up on a high horse now.

karen -- As an individual, did you express interest and realistically work for? If so, that's too bad they overlooked you for lack of a penis. It's like not letting a child with aptitude play hockey. But if you were born and trained to be a figure skater and playing hockey was just a pipe dream of perhaps the grass being greener on the otherside, well it's good the farm went to one more capable, if indeed it did.